DON'T TRY TO FORCE ME TO MY KNEES TO PAY HOMAGE

DON’T TRY TO FORCE ME TO MY KNEES TO PAY HOMAGE

Don’t try to force me to my knees to pay homage to the world

you’re living in, and I won’t ask you to verify my last mirage.

Let’s just pass through each other imperturbably intense

as two cosmic events encountering in this immensity

like galaxies in a ghost dance when the night

is an abysmal radiance, and I’m mystically intrigued

with the turn of your earlobes, oysters making pearls,

where silver ripples of rain are hooped like the orbits

of shepherd moons on a concentric abacus of prayer-beads,

and though I’m not trying to account for anything,

what metaphors they might have in common

with the golden ratio of sunflowers and seashells.

I want to bathe naked with you in the sacred pools

of a silence that isn’t polluted by the history of our sorrows.

Even if they prove as waterproof as a twelve volume tattoo

they’ll wash off in the stars if you scrub hard enough.

I want to look at you with innocent eyes again and again

directly into the eyes of a human insight into creation

and the occult labour of enlightened destruction

that follows in the wake of winged heels that are blown

like blossoms off the green boughs of their night songs

so that an apprentice of your heart like I am

might sweeten like an art in the afterglow

of the many journeys, many sunsets that have flavoured it

like an old brandy remembering what it was like to be a young wine.

I don’t want to broker your light through the middle man

of a lens, a mirror, a window that treated its stars like dirt.

I don’t want to analyze why you’re sitting on the futon

crying, and feel the supple silence after I ask you why

rigidify into a maze of lab rats looking for antidotes

to a snakepit of radioactive wavelengths that can’t be trained

to bite somebody else if that’s what’s on their mind.

Why spring? Why autumn? Why passions you pick up

like a fever from the stars on a hot summer night

when you fall in love with the cool poultice of the moon

lying like a waterlily pad on your forehead, trying

to draw the infection out like enlightenment from

the iris of your third eye rooting in the spiritual looking glass

of a crystal skull suffering from the chromatic aberration of its rainbows?

I promise not to shatter your delusions, if you

never stop setting my doorways on fire everytime

you walk into the room like a total eclipse of the senses

in black underwear with a smile like a starmap on your face.

I want to walk down a long, country road at night

with you in a state of grace that intensifies

the hermit thrush’s longing for the unattainable.

I want to feel your golden needle penetrate my voodoo heart

like a love song that never mended, a wound

even the latest surgeons don’t know how to stitch up.

If I praise your body like the resurgence of a sea on the moon,

don’t misconstrue that as an insult to the fire

on the altar of your mind. If I touch you and light comes

on the first day of creation to the fingertips of the blind,

how is that different from nocturnal wildflowers

opening like eyes in the starfields of the mystically inclined?

If I seek illumination from the dark mysteries of the blood

like a black rose in a cult of thorns, and my intensities

engender life forms on planets that seem uninhabitably mad to you,

and you’re not convinced there are evergreens that germinate

and bloom like a Zen garden of pine-cones in fire,

I won’t challenge the evanescent vapour of a dream

that’s haunting you like the fragrance of a song for the dead

you can’t get out of your clothes, or those boas of moonlight

that feather the bays and contours of your lonely island shores

as if someone who had drowned in the emotional undertow

of your breakers, trying to get to you, were about to be

washed up like the master of some lost purpose

under the eyelid of the next wave, and you, just out of reach.

I will not ask you what that was. Enigma favours you.

More than one petal on a sundial and time flowers

in all directions at once. I will not disturb the dead

that are buried in you. I have my own, and sharing

isn’t disclosure. Tell your ghosts they’re as free

to answer the seance of your longing as they ever were.

I don’t expect you to translate the poetry of your silence

into the same language you speak to me in, nor the river

to uproot the tributaries of the lifelines that sustain it.

In every affair, one is the grammar, and the other,

the inspiration of the holy book they collaborate on

like the biography of water’s fathomless afterlives.

And none of the rules, like your tears, indelible

should the wind or the rain decide to wash them out

like a flashflood of stars in a spring run-off

that sweeps your heart downstream like a message

in a bottle for someone else should you decide

you need a stable bridge not an unmoored lifeboat like me.

If you’re attached to the danger of living as I am

when I’m with you, who’s in need of saving

when you can drown a whole ocean of sacred syllables

in a few simple tears or a dragon of crazy wisdom

with fireflies in its eyes and a moonrise in its heart

in a single star in the rear view mirror of last night’s dream

where objects, like lovers, are always closer than they seem.

PATRICK WHITE